Donate
Not open yet. This page says what it will be, so that when it opens there is nothing to explain.
Where the money goes
To building and maintaining these apps, and to the ones after them. Nothing here has a paid tier, an upsell, or an advertisement, and it never will, so donations are the only way this gets funded.
Well-maintained is doing real work in that sentence. The world does not need more launched software. It needs software somebody is still looking after in five years, and that is the part nobody wants to pay for.
What donating gets you
- A vote on what gets built next. Members can propose apps, comment publicly on the existing ones, and vote to order the queue.
- The ledger. Every contribution and every expense, itemised in public.
And two limits, written down now so they are not negotiated later:
- A donation buys a vote on priorities. It does not buy a vote on content, and it does not buy an exemption from the standard. If the most-requested app cannot be built without failing the standard, it does not get built, and the reason gets published.
- Voting lives on this website and never inside an app. The apps have no accounts and no network. Our own standard scores an app zero for selling anything inside a child's activity, and the way this is funded does not get to compromise the thing being funded.
There is a real weakness in donor voting: it weights the people who can afford to give. It is what can actually be run today rather than what is fairest, and if a better mechanism turns up this paragraph is the one that changes.
Why it is not open today
Because doing it properly takes longer than putting a button up. The intention is a public ledger through a fiscal host, which makes donations tax-deductible and makes every expense visible without anybody having to be trusted. That is an application and a wait rather than an afternoon.
A payment button could go up this week. A ledger that anybody can audit could not, and the second one is the point.
In the meantime
The apps are finished, free, and need no permission. Download one and use it. Nothing is being held back until somebody pays.